Garden № 4821
Formwork Garden
Guide the lone wanderer to gather every light
Formwork Garden represents how I think about product design: rigid where it must be, alive everywhere else.
The formwork is the invisible infrastructure: the design system, the grid, the technical constraints, the business requirements. It is the mould that holds a product together and keeps it stable, scalable and functional, so it can exist without collapsing under its own complexity.
The garden is where the actual experience happens: the user’s journey, and the living evolution of the product. The structure is planned; the experience is fluid, unpredictable and needs constant tending.
I don’t design the surface first. I build what holds it up. I work as a gardener as much as an architect. I lay the structure, then prune, seed and cultivate it from real feedback.
These are disciplines married to empathy: strict technical standards, applied only to make the outcome natural, delightful and human. Design is not a skin applied at the end. It is the making of a place where people can flourish.
This garden represents my design practice, built to be explored. What you see is play; what holds it up is a system. No two gardens are alike. There are more than anyone will ever walk.
Inspired by ,His board-formed concrete is the garden’s stone: quiet, heavy, printed with the timber that shaped it.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,Paths that join only from where you stand. The garden builds them in stone and lets you walk them.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,The water is raked like gravel: straight lines that bend to ring every island.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,Waves drawn as rhythm and contour, breaking on the windward shore and lying quiet in the lee.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,Instruments the size of buildings, the hour read off stone by a shadow. The garden’s sundial is a small one.Read more(opens in a new tab) and .The deepest pool is cut like a stepwell, stairs folding down to the water.Read more(opens in a new tab)
Puzzles from ,A triangle of cubes that cannot stand, a stair that climbs forever. Each closes from one place only.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,Two circles crossing into an almond, seven into a flower: inlaid in the floors and drawn into some crossings.Read more(opens in a new tab) ,A yellow triangle, a red square, a blue circle, squares inside squares. Here it is enamel, tile and glass, and colour always means something.Read more(opens in a new tab) and .Flat things that move: stripes slide past each other, and a bridge scattered across a dozen surfaces comes together from one view.Read more(opens in a new tab)
Catch every light in the garden.
© 2026 Jeethu Karthik